Excellent postings from the Yahoo message boards

First this guy...
*CONFESSIONS* of a Reformed Liberal by... intergalactic_attorney

When I was young I was crazy. I was rebellious. I was a snob. I hated authority. It all accelerated when I went to college, and I started taking part in life as an acknowledged adult. I was enamored with my new status, and aggressively participated in my new discovery of politics, believing I could truly make a difference. But having some education, I soon discovered that many of the people I was arguing with outside of school were functionally illiterate, and that changed me. It made me feel superior to them, and I behaved badly when addressing them, focusing on their literary mistakes and regional dialect with a method of ridiculing attack to discredit, rather than confront their substance directly. I found that I could easily manipulate these simple people and that reinforced my feelings of superiority. I was caught-up in a whirl of egotism, and gravitated toward the group that I identified with most, the Liberals. Their elitist snobbery attracted me the most, although I did not realize it at the time. I envied their self-importance. They accepted me with open arms, and I emulated them as best as I could for a long time, feeling satisfied I was among the best of the best. It was years later when I finally realized that I had allied myself with a party of illusion, snobbery, ego, vanity, and irresponsibility, and that I had fooled myself. The disillusionment was pervasive, and my life began to change. I began to admit how foolish and naive my younger self was, an admission I would never have been able to make as a devout Liberal, but one I found most mature adults made upon leaving their twenties. I became humble, and stopped bragging about my intellect, an intellect which seemed hollow for the first time in my life. I suppressed the Pavlovian impulse to rebel, and I abandoned silly conspiracy theories that I had relied upon as truth for years, understanding that I had even invented some of them myself, unconsciously, as a defense mechanism in debate. Finally, and most importantly, I began taking responsibility for my own actions, and improved on my newly discovered hypocritical tendencies. At that moment an epiphany was impressed upon me...that I was no longer a Liberal, and that leaving that absurd ideology behind opened a world of opportunity I could never have previously imagined. That was twenty years ago. My life has seen nothing but success from that day forward. I laugh when I see many of the posts here from Liberals, as one would laugh at a younger, immature self. Not a condescending laugh, but one that seems to say, "Just wait, you'll see."

My Response

One could take your post and substitute the word Conservative for the word Liberal and it would still apply and still make sense. Radical ideology reinforced through real and pseudo-intellectualism is a common practice and a fascist concept.
Maturity has a way of creeping up on you, however, the extreme version of Liberalism and Conservatism are both useless in their own right.
The only ideology that applies to the worlds problems today is common sense. I am a Democrat and a purported Liberal , but as far as identifying with the issues, I would be viewed as a Conservative. Consequently the mere practice of labeling thinking people into only one of two groups seems absurd.
Most often I tell people that I am neither for a Conservative or Liberal administration, but a competent one.

Fellow Moderate Liberal? Blogger

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